A place to explore questions about Torah, Jewish tradition and how we interact with the world meaningfully.

Friday, July 21, 2017

Parashat Mattot: Seeing The Other

The ad took up a full page in the newspaper. A prayer, a
Jewish prayer, for soldiers going off to war, presented by the religious leader
of the local community, beginning with the Shema in transliterated Hebrew, and
ending with the words of the Psalms: “For thy salvation do I hope, O Lord!” The
prayer, fitting a time of war, beseeches God to defeat the enemy, to inspire
the young soldier and watch over them, and to watch over the welfare of the
country and its leadership. The local Jewish community, having seen this
prayer, watching their own children and their neighbors’ children go off to
war, must have found it inspiring, and the Christian community, I suspect,
found it encouraging as well.

The prayer I’m referring to is the Prayer for Confederate
soldiers, written by Rev. M. J. Michelbacher, “minister” of the Hebrew Congregation,
“House of Love” in Richmond Virginia, now headed by my colleague Scott Nagel.
The enemy invoked in the prayer is, of course, the North, the Union…you know,
the good guys. And here is a Jewish prayer celebrating what we know and understand,
and what many of our Movement’s founders understood, to be the bad guys, the
Confederacy.

It would be really easy for us to dismiss this as a
particular stain of our history, but a minor one, that little shadow on the
tablecloth where the wine got spilled at Seder once. We could blow it off, or
explain it away, or justify it in a hundred different ways: a product of its
time and place, the local Jews were afraid to speak out against injustice, etc.
and so forth. Or we could just ignore it, and celebrate Jewish abolitionists
and later civil rights leaders and pretend it’s not there. But there it is,
beautifully and thoughtfully written by the local Jewish leader, publicized and
memorialized at a time of great conflict, as Michelman writes, “this once happy
country inflamed”.

That part should sound familiar to us. Perhaps you’ve moved
on from the gnashing of teeth and bitter divide of 2016, and if you have, I
commend you. I’m still a mess, and let me be clear; I’m a mess as much over the
division between people—the anger, the howling rage and alienation—as I am over
any particular policy or political stance. We are very quick to see one another
as enemies instead of neighbors. We are being “Othered” from one another; along
divisions old and new. And we are increasingly insulating ourselves from people
who are different and with whom we agree, happily dismissing their lived
experience. When the threat from the Majority leader in the senate is they may
have to collaborate and compromise with the other side of the aisle, I think it’s
safe to say that our ability to relate to each other is pretty trashed.

What happens when we see each other as enemies? Our Torah
portion gives us an example of that. Moses is preparing Israel to finally, finally enter the promised land, when the
tribes of Reuben and Gad make a modest proposal. You see, the lands just
outside what would be Israel happen to be great land for cattle, which was
Reuben and Gad’s thing. They ask, rather than enter the land, if they could
settle just outside, where it makes more sense for their livelihood. “It would be
a favor for us” they say.

Well, they may have thought that was a reasonable request,
but Moses instead hears treachery and cowardice. Moses accuses them of being
rebels, just like the previous generations, letting their brothers in the other
tribes go to fight while they betray their loyalty to God. They don’t want land
for their cattle; they just want to blow up the whole enterprise and ruin
Israel, just like the previous rebels did. That Reuben—the tribe behind the
last rebellion—was asking for this favor didn’t help. It takes both tribes
declaring that they would go into the land and fight in front of the rest of
the tribes as shock troops, as the vanguard, to calm Moses down from his wrath
and help him see that they in fact were not trying to betray Israel, but do
what was right for their families.

Moses doesn’t see fellow Israelites looking for their own
interests asking permission and blessing for their choices; he sees—through the
lens of previous experience—enemies trying to destroy God’s people. In fact we
see a role-reversal of Moses here; instead of being the gentle and
understanding one who patiently explains God’s commandments to a rebellious people,
the commentator Abravanel imagines the leaders of the tribe stepping forward
and explaining again, quietly, so Moses understands the request, desperately
trying not to embarrass him.

How often are we Moses, quick to anger, to assume we know
the other’s motivations, and those motivations have to be harmful, or naïve, or
foolish? How much easier is it for us to speak to like-minded people about how
we see them, those who would harm us,
rather than step forward to speak patiently, quietly with those who would
disagree with us? We talk about loving the neighbor and the stranger, but do we
practice what we preach?

In her book “From Enemy to Friend”, Rabbi Amy Eilberg talks
about different spiritual practices, even simple ones, to help us get beyond
seeing the other as “Other”. Deepening our curiosity rather than our
defensiveness by asking questions, checking in to our reaction to conflict and
being self-aware of how we viscerally respond to others, trying to speak as our
seeming opponent and explain from her point of view, even something as simple
as asking ourselves “Are you sure?” when our inclination is to dig in. Any of
those would give us the tools Moses lacked in the parasha, to truly see and embrace the other, minimize stereotyping
and blame, while still upholding our own values and beliefs, in order to come
to understanding. I think it is possible, but only if we put in the effort, the
spiritual work of slowing down our own gut reaction to conflict.

The Prayer for a Confederate Soldier begins and ends with
the Shema, our prayer from Deuteronomy, reminding us that God is One. But
Oneness is not Sameness, and the rabbis remind us that God’s greatness is that
we are all, as different and diverse as we are, created in God’s image, and
that makes us sacred. So I pray not for victory against enemies, but to help us
see those differences as holy; not for victory, but for love, not for victory,
but for understanding. Not for victory, but Wholeness, for Shalom. May it be
so. Amen.

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About Me

I'm blessed to serve as spiritual leader and teacher of an historic and dynamic Reform Jewish congregation, the only one in the state of Delaware. My hope is to make Torah study, worship and music and community accessible, meaningful and engaging. My family, especially my wife and toddler son, continuously bring me joy and inspiration.